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Monday, November 30, 2015

After an afternoon teaching John James - reducing the pleasure of that work to gobbets of reference - how can you not 'get' the pleasure? - to Liverpool in the rain, to Storm for a very packed - the most packed yet - reading by Adam Hampton, me, and Sandeep Parmar, in that order. Sandeep was cool and relaxed, read really well, great work; I was the usual headless chicken; I read well, and people enjoyed it, I think. I was unusually nervous and afterwards exhausted. (It was a nervy experience reading to a 'home crowd', as Elly Rees understood, having done so herself a couple of months ago). Set list:

Saturday, November 28, 2015

1.1The investigation and invention of poetic
forms to accommodate and inaugurate new modes of perception and expression.

1.11This will have the additional effect of
extending the paradigm ‘poetry’.

1.2Secondly, it frustrates the processes of
naturalisation: delays readers reducing the strangeness of poetic language to
paraphrase, to everyday language statements about the external world.

1.21In a poem, it is only through the
operations of poetic artifice that the perceptions of the ordinary everyday
world are disrupted and criticised.

1.3The concept of ‘poetry’ is entropic, and
ceases to break its own paradigm, through time.

1.4It is only through the development of new
formal devices that both naturalisation and entropy can be delayed.

2Such a poetry owes a general debt to
modernism; specifically it is a reading of its forgotten vitality.

2.1It looks to the more extreme forms of
modernism (Springand All not The Waste Land; Finnegans
Wake not Ulysses), those still
not wholly assimilated, and neutralised, by the Movement orthodoxy in British
Poetry.

2.11This
paradoxical return can be called postmodernism.

2.111It is broader in its use here than the simple
ludic metaphorisation which the Movement orthodoxy, with its anti-modernist streak, has also claimed
in its name.

2.12It is also more precise and analytical than
‘postmodernism’ used as a tag to sell an apolitical product and consumer boom
in contemporary art.

2.2There should be a better term, one that
is not itself a battleground, but there isn’t.

3Postmodernism can be most usefully
used to designate a general philosophical worldview.

3.1Knowledge is defined as a permanent
condition of exploratory and incomplete process.

3.2Rules are not seen as normative
prescriptions, not necessarily as descriptions, but a parameters produced
co-terminously with the event or process they regulate.

3.3Any activity is seen as unpredictable and
is constantly moving into the unknown, towards the creation of the new, not
returning always to the recognisable.

6.12The desire to change the world is not
simply exchanged for the desire to change the reader.For a poem, as it is being read, they are
slenderly identical.

6.13This is to concede a powerful defeat: to
begin to change the desires of a reader.

6.2Subversion, in the text, is effective
primarily at the level of form.

6.21Aestheticism is not necessarily apolitical,
although it should not be complacently and autonomously closed.

7Defamiliarisation and deformation are
subversive and transformative elements in the poetic text.

7.1The objects of the world are liberated
from the reality principle in the formal autonomy of the poem, as is language,
free from reference.

7.11The autonomy of art institutes its critical
function.

7.12The aesthetic function animates the
critical function: the objects of the world and language are capable of
recombination.

7.13The critical function is de-centred,
sceptical, anarchistic.

7.2It is not a question of reproducing a
coherent utopian vision (or a consistent discourse) but of producing active
‘figures’ or ‘noise’ - depending upon one’s metaphor - which frustrate
natualisation and notions of social consistency.

8The text must be constant in its
inconsistency, forever in a state of critical becoming.

8.1The ethic of working for the poet is not
a work ethic.Working the work is his or
her state of becoming.

9Reading the poem should be an active
education of desire, not a recognition, fulfilment and killing of desire.

9.1The reader, producing the poem in his or
her reading, enters an incomplete, open realm of imaginative freedom,
recognises its formal autonomy.

9.2This is the poem’s affirmative moment at
which its indeterminacy and discontinuity, or its foregrounded devices which
invite the reader to participate, co-extend with the reader’s act of reading.

9.3The affirmative moment can never wholly
be divorced from the critical function: the cry of hope and the cry of despair
are heard together.

9.31They can either be made to be heard in
harmony (offering utopic images or a programme).

9.32Or they can be made to be heard in
dissonance (countering consistency).

9.321Only this last combination can fully engage
the reader, educate desire.

9.4In the act of constructing its meanings,
the readers share in the poem’s state of becoming.

9.41In doing so, they should discover that it
is also what a text is made to do,
not merely what it is made to mean,
that is revolutionary.

9.42At this point, the constant change of the postmodern condition
engages the future possibility of non-programmatic social change.

9.43These meet, in the reader’s reading, not in
the writer’s writing, in changing the desires of a reader, at the moment of
affirmation.

10The poem, as it is read, projects a
future in its very refusal to mean this
world.

10.1This moment of affirmation, the turning
towards the future suggests that however much postmodern these propositions are, they are pre-something else, flashlights unwittingly signalling as yet
unreadable messages.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

John Ash has always adopted a particular line in
aestheticism.In his works, the world is
present but estranged, not so as to make that strangeness terrifying or
alienating, as in Kafka, but to make it delightful and pleasurable, which
surely must be a more difficult, if also more necessary, transformation.It is also a more dangerous one, in that the
impedimenta of melodrama, pastoral silliness and campness must be used.Some poems in Disbelief, Ash’s latest and, in many ways, best volume, repeat the
strategies of earlier books.(See my
review of The Goodbyes, PNR 37.)The operative staginess (‘These are steps we will descend in sleep/like
echoes of ourselves, each singing/in our different ways, without dull
repetition …’) does, in fact, seem to have been repeated too many times to
remain effective; all defamiliarising gestures have an entropy towards the
familiar, a danger Ash must be aware of, given the range of this new book.When not concerned with individual aesthetic
consciousness, Ash creates imaginatively playful utopias, which he then
describes, images of a possible non-alienating social freedom.It is precisely the question of description in this project which now
disturbs me.The idea that an image of a possible utopia might be
produced by defamiliarising and aestheticising the world alone, by making it
fictive - which still seems to me a necessary first step - seems unwittingly
complacent.Lyotard in ‘The Critical
Function of the Work of Art’ (in Driftworks)
questions art which remains ‘a representation
of something to come; this is to remain within the order of representation
….The system, as it exists, absorbs
every consistent discourse; the important thing is not to produce a consistent
discourse but rather to produce ‘figures’ within reality.The poet holds language ‘under suspicion, ie
to bring about figures which would never have been produced, that language
might not tolerate, and which may never be audible, perceptible, for us’.To put it another way, Ash often argues,
rather insistently, the case for aestheticism: his transformations happen at
the level of semantics, often strikingly so: his ‘The Second Lecture: An
over-excited man tells us about clouds’ - with its use of synaesthesia and
imaginative and metaphoric dissolution - ends ‘We are effaced.A chrysanthemum of air remains poised to drop
its petals into the blue that will reshape them endlessly.’But at the levels of syntax, rhythm, line,
phonology and grammar the conventions are often as intact as they are in the
varieties of contemporary poetry that Ash - rightly - has criticised
repeatedly.He tells us of the
postmodern condition, but he never enacts this formally:

I regard the world as a TV

on which I change channels at will,

never moving from the bed.

It is, I would contend, only through formal
disruption that a desire for change
can be activated, involving the reader directly in the construction of the
meaning of the poem, something Ash’s insistence makes hard: ‘utopia’ is not a
radiant isolated image, but an active education of desire.

Nevertheless, this
collection covers new ground, even within his aestheticism.His ‘urban pastoralism’ is extended
dramatically in an embarrassingly whimsical ‘Eclogue’ (for Black American
English: ‘Are these the locals honey? / They sure talk funny.’), but in ‘Men,
Women and Children’ the effect can be sour: although ‘life is a festive
marching to no purpose’, the ‘destination’ may yet turn out to be ‘the
oppressive portals of the capital, / the altars still smelling of blood’.The litany, ‘The sky my husband’, is a kind
of printout of possibilities that enacts metaphoricity itself as it cancels the
meaning of the repeated word ‘sky’: ‘The sky my galleries my icons / The sky my
radio my satellite my video’.Ash has
also turned more expansively to prose, as in ‘Every Story Tells It All’, which
is a serial writing in search of its own evasive narrative.There are ‘translations’ of Li Ho, a found
text from Lorca’s letters.But, particularly
towards the end of the book, there is a seriousness of tone, as in ‘The Nine
Moons of Austin’, which, when it addresses the poet Christopher Middleton,
approximates something of the older poet’s integrity and capacity for wonder:

You are translating from the German,

difficult words: heilignòchterne,

meaning both ‘holy’ and ‘lucid’

like this moment of stillness and clouds

passing, noble as HØlderlin’s
swans.

15 August 1987PN Review 63, 1988

Link to new 'Introduction' and links to all contents of Far Languagehere.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

robert sheppard: the tweets of microbius: life is short at bluecoat, liverpool (november 15th 2015):

part of being human: a festival of the humanities

curated by professor ailsa cox

this was a celebration of all things small and perfectly formed, from the hadron to the haiku, the boson to the butterfly. activities include talks, exhibitions and hands-on workshops on how we perceive and capture moments in time; on miniature objects and microscopic creatures; and on the short form in the arts and literature.

i read the 'tweets of microbius', twittersonnets. the tweet versions of these twittersonnets may be found on microbius’ twitterfeed: https://twitter.com/microbius﻿.

the form was invented by the invented rene van valckenborch and all of his twitterodes (the originals) may be read here. or click onto 2010 to the right of this post and you'll betaken to them all, AND individual posts with photos. worth a look. read them in my (or his) the translated man (shearsman 2013). see here.

this is the last tweet, complete with images!

micrographia

hooke's flea

flee from

the flea u

nder the g

lass: furr

y legs and

tufted tu

sks; preci

se menace/

look at ho

oke’s full

stop: scuf

fed flares

, a furred

black sun

hooke's fullstop

hooke's book, toppled over

these sonnets come from a longer sonnet work called 'the song nets'. some of the crap possible titles that have been rejected include 'the big sonnet' or 'total's miscellany' and even the dylanesque 'corona corona'. ouch! (even in lower case).

Friday, November 20, 2015

Tony Frazer is one of
the great poetry publishers of our time. 'This website,' the editors say, 'is
a tribute to him on his 64th birthday. It contains more than 200 contributions
from poets whose writing he has published since 1981 under his imprints Shearsman Books and Shearsman Magazine, as well
as from friends and well-wishers. Together, these present a unique collective
tribute not only to Tony’s achievement as the publisher of more than 300
writers, but as a friend, as a man. In its variety and richness, this unusual
anthology bears witness to the far-sightedness, adventurousness, eclecticism
and dedication of Tony’s vision for poetry and his tireless pursuit of the new,
the original and the excellent.'

My contribution is a fictional poem by a fictional poet who
writes a real homage to a real poet who was translated by Tony Frazer. (He is a
good translator, a fact not mentioned in the above, but I’m sure other contributors
in this huge labyrinth of praise have noted the fact.)

It will take a long time to read all of this website, but a first surf
(nobody uses that metaphor anymore, do they?) reveals a poem by Scott Thurston
about generosity, here. Everybody uses that word of Tony. Kelvin Corcoran gets it
right, when he says:

To begin with, it’s very hard to wrest work from his hands
despite how busy he might be - surrounded by piles of manuscripts, books to
proof, books to post and books to read. Then you discover how quickly he
works. Next you’re floored by the realisation that uniquely for a
publisher he does exactly what he says he will do. Tony’s unstinting
generosity, good sense and boundless energy shines brightly in a dim world.

Read the rest of his piece here. As I say: 'We must honour this extraordinary and extraordinarily
generous man.' (See all the short tributes here.)

Patricia Farrell’s visual tribute alerts us to the other
media (image and video) also represented, here.

It is great to see two wily and incisive poems by Roy Fisher here, and sad but
gratifying to read Lee Harwood’s prose tribute, one of the last things he must
have written, here.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

With a book out with this sub-title, I can't deny it. (More here on 60!) (The title An Educated Desire alludes to my pedagogic poetics piece, 'The Education of Desire' which is now here.)

This festschrift, mainly edited by Scott Thurston with the help of Patricia Farrell, and published by Alec Newman's Knives Forks and Spoons Press, is now out. There are 66 contributors, I think, and I am supremely and humbly moved by these editings, productions and contributions. (It's a great anthology of contemporary poetry.) I will contact each individually, of course, but that will take time (I'm very busy). And perhaps I'll respond to the book more fully here. (More on the book and my receiving of it at my 60th party here.)

So a big THANK YOU to all: to Scott, Alec, Patricia, and the contributors.

The book is available here, along with a sample and a list of contributors.
﻿

Saturday, November 14, 2015

‘Wet, golden-leaved pathways. Past
the Agency, the pub, the coinshops, the new
community bookshop… Poet, on his twenty-
fourth birthday, shelters in yards and doorways

to write:
Past Talbot’s Cafe, where men play dominoes,
set before repeat afternoon television. Passing
the old man headed there – his tartan hat beacon

of you-know-what – as he says to all passers,
paralytic fingers twitching, “Are you now all right?”
Answer yes to his eyes, nothing to nothing. On;

to the watery Back-of-the-Inns, and round past
Tombland at early dusk, late-autumn afternoon,
wet leaves stuck to cobbles under homing feet.’

Milton Sonnet VII: 1632/November 14th 1979/2007/Remode 2014

For more on this metamorphosed birthday poem, see here. (And, yes, it's my birthday. This doesn't seem like ten years ago, but it was!) What's he laughing about, below? See here for what's in the birthday present, and here.

And for all the poems de-selected from my new 'selected poems', History or Sleep, see here.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

In some other life, she might have watched the
Streader brothers walking across Southwick Green, ferocious in argument,
conspiratorial in intimacy, in a way that she, as an only child, would never
have understood. Or the Parsons brothers for that matter.

She might have been webbed with spidery lines, a
blue-veined cheese, snakeskin coiling up her arm like a long glove above the
claw.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

In a real-life drama, she might have walked to the
kitchen to put the kettle on as though this was an ordinary Saturday morning.
She would have noticed two ships waiting to enter Shoreham Harbour,
but in faint sea-mist, erasing the horizon, fusing foreground and background.
‘Why bring this up now?’ she would have asked, without rage, as she heard him
behind her at the door.

Monday, November 09, 2015

She might have conjured two
elderly musicians in a Budapest
square, wheezing accordion supporting scratchy fiddle: such a fragile take on Autumn Leaves transposing her into a
stem of melody that would sprout in the late summer chill. Or not.